This report and policy brief from the Commission on Sustainable Agriculture Intensification (CoSAI) examine how urban and peri-urban agriculture in the Global South can help provide healthy, safe and nutritious food, and protect against the impacts of climate change and pandemics.

The UK’s Food Standards Agency has published four reports reviewing the evidence on factors that influence food consumption behaviours. They cover interventions to reduce salt, fat and sugar consumption; public views of and influences on meat and dairy consumption; and the psychologies of food choice.

The Good Food Institute has published a series of four reports giving the latest industry and investment updates about alternative proteins, including plant-based foods, fermentation, cellular agriculture, and alternative seafood.

This report from World Animal Protection and Tasting the Future argues that industrial livestock farming negatively affects human health through five main pathways: malnutrition and obesity; antibiotic resistant microbes; foodborne illnesses worsened by animals being reared in stressful conditions; illnesses from environmental contamination, such as zinc in animal excretions; and the physical and mental impacts of poor working conditions in slaughter, processing and packaging facilities. It also sets out proposed systemic shifts and recommendations for policymakers.

Immediate and deep emissions reductions across all sectors are needed, says this report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). While global greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise, there have been significant decreases over the last decade in the cost of important low-emissions technologies such as solar energy, wind energy and lithium-ion batteries, and policies on climate mitigation are expanding and have avoided some emissions.

This paper sets out proposals for reforming the global food system to reduce the risk of disease outbreaks and pandemics originating from wildlife. It proposes limiting human encroachment on tropical areas of wilderness by shifting to diets low in animal-source foods; reducing urban demand for tropical wild meat while protecting access to wild meat by indigenous and subsistence communities; and improving biosecurity measures to prevent transmission of diseases between wildlife and humans along animal source food supply chains.

This paper sets out the concept of “agricultural rewilding”, which the authors place between agroecology and rewilding. The literature review examines how rewilding of livestock systems can help to protect biodiversity, and identifies questions for further research.

Prompted by the article The role of fats in the transition to sustainable diets (2021) authored by Bojana Bajželj, Federica Laguzzi and Elin Röös, TABLE hosted a webinar on 13 April 2022 to discuss the role of fats from a food systems perspective. The discussion covered environmental considerations and tradeoffs with different sources of fat production, the nutritional nuances of different types of fat, and what role could microbial oils and insects play in 'solving the fat gap.' 

This report by IPES-Food (the International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems) scrutinises eight key claims about the future of protein (including livestock and alternative proteins), identifies five ways in which these claims result in oversimplified discussions, and sets out three recommendations to reframe discussions and reduce polarisation.